Thursday, September 17, 2015

New Blood Bowl Boardgame?

I have seen some rumors floating about about a new Blood Bowl boardgame being released by GW in the near future. We hear these types of things all the time and I would put more stock in the rumors about the Horus Heresy game in the near future than Blood Bowl but I did read something interesting at Warseer that sounds very GW like:

Those hoping for this version of Blood Bowl to be a fully updated
version of the game, with a new BRB and team rosters, would have be
sorely disappointed. In fact I think it would have been the biggest
criticism of this version of Blood Bowl. This version was a self
contained game, based on the old rules without going into the more long
winded side of things such as league rules and team rosters.
It was a game where one player played the Reikland Reavers in a campaign
series of 3 linked games against different opponents, one was the
"Chaos All Stars", another "The Gouged Eye" and I think the fourth was
the "Elfheim Reavers." These games weren't exactly standard games and
had things such as specific kick off events that would happen in that
particular game (Rather than rolling for them.) With plastic markers to
represent these on the pitch provided in the box.
The team rosters for the teams in the box didn't have your traditional
Blood Bowl rosters. Rather they had Star Players integrated as part of
the standard team roster for the scenarios in the box. I know the
intention was to include as many Star Players in the box as possible in
order to encourage older players to purchase the box.

This appears to line up with how GW sees these things. They would not want to support the release of 20+ teams and all sorts of roster options as they really only think the compete with themselves for our dollars. IE money not spent on Blood Bowl could only possibly go to 40K or AoS. Currently they put about 50 Minis in a 125 starter box so 4 teams of 11 guys would fit in that and since most are only man sized you could probably still around the board and card stock pieces. That leaves an interesting dilemma if you need a couple of minis for each team to get them to a real roster, how do you get those minis? Buy another copy or maybe wait for the other producers to fill in with "compatible" style minis. I am sure those will be show up on indiegogo within days of content images leaking. Just 3-4 metal/resin figures per team though probably fun about the cost of another game box.

Blood Bowl was loosely modeled on the WHFB world with place names and races and that is gone so it would make less sense to release this now. Last year would have made more before the start of the End of Times, it might have even helped move WFB sets if they left the old rules up so people could see the larger game and convert a team or two. Blood bowl has a problem already with fitting the minis in the grid so the new bigger AoS stuff would be an issue but I am sure the Sigmarine Blood Bowl team would be the best according to GW.

Another issue is GW is very much about IP right now the Blood Bowl is not defend-able IP. The races are pretty generic and the concept of fantasy creatures playing football appeared before Blood Bowl was released like in a Dragon Magazine game from 1982:

It just does not seem like it lines up with how they are doing things right now. Maybe in a few more years of stagnant performance. Or if they find they really need a revenue post they could probably move 20K copies of this to established players but that is only like 2M dollars which is only about how much GW normally pulls in a week.

As a note can anyone tell me what facebook feed this post got link in?

I am also a huge blood bowl fan in a league. You can check out some of my collection of blood bowl miniatures in the major series blood bowl collection link on the right. I would also probably buy it as even if they teams are not perfect most well sculpted blood bowl teams go for more than 32 dollars each now anyway. Normally I complain about GW not bringing value but compared to 50 dollar metal 11-12 man teams and 20 dollar big guys that is an improvement.